Andrew's ramblings

Blue Dragon open source almost 12 months later

Tags: General, Coldfusion, OpenBD, Railo

Well it is 12 months now since New Atlanta announced that they were open sourcing their J2EE version of BlueDragon, since then a lot of discussions on the future of their product and CFML in a whole had sparked some heated discussions since the announcement.

It was a very brave move for New Atlanta to decide to make that decision, and most people that I have spoken to over the last 12 months were under the impression that it was for selfish reasons. Since then it has been more than for selfish reasons.

So what has transpired since then has been nothing but a positive move in the right direction, when it comes to choices of a CFML engine and although as young as the product was, it has certainly matured since it was released as open sourced software and looks like to continue.

Since then Railo have also announced that they will also be releasing their product as open source, and now with the fact that there is a number of options that one can build upon, we the developers seem to be the winner over all.

Why is that!!

Well it means that the direction that these companies are pushing for is a core engine, which I believe was the intention of New Atlanta all along. Most people didn't see this at the time, and now that Railo have done the same thing, it highlights the fact that this new approach is going to work and benefit us more. The only downside to this now, is the one engine that began all this ColdFusion itself.

So what do Adobe have in mind for us, well the only thing we can do is speculate on what they might have in mind. But the one thing for certain now is that they are about to play a catch up game, only in the sense that there is now more pressure for them to follow and release ColdFusion as open source, and they have always been open to the idea of doing that and charging for the IDE. Sounds very Microsoft doesn't it, but at least Microsoft had the foresight to know that. Now that Adobe have also released information on their new IDE called bolt, there is a chance that ColdFusion might just be going this way, but we will have to wait and see.

If Adobe do this what would that mean to them, well it means that if it happens they are now part of a team of people who can oversee the development of core functionality when it comes to the scripting language. But more importantly the benefits will come from Adobe themselves, and a few other people along the way. Provided Adobe have the foresight to see this, and I am sure they do.

The future of ColdFusion and I mean CFML here and not the product, merges with all the other open source products and then each of them then focus on providing plugin modules. Wait a minute I hear you saying that will never happen, then my question would be this to you then if you are thinking that. Think about what Adobe as a company produces as software before they took the plunge and bought Macromedia? For those of you who have used their products going back to the days, when it was primarily Mac Software, the PC versions never had the same functionality that both platform versions share today.

So if I was to guess, and yes it is a guess. I strongly believe that Adobe would be fools not to take the bull by the horns, and provide modules that could be used to a single unified open source engine. After all there is nothing special about the scripting side of the language, the power of ColdFusion comes from the features it is packed with. I have heard people say in the past when New Atlanta open sourced their J2EE version, that it was a way to get their product out to more people. It might have been, but the momentum of open source has shown that everyone can benefit from it and Adobe could do that as well with the right mind set.

And Adobe would not be loosing money in the long run, they would be making it based on the assumption that their integration into their other suite of tools could then be purchased and installed into other open source engines, whether that be unified as one engine or singular independent engines is a going to be a wait and see.

Anyway the next 12 months is going to be interesting to say the least.

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